Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of internet web server facilitated ecommerce and mobile ecommerce apps for handheld computerized devices.
Description of the Related Art
As internet technology has advanced, more and more commerce is done using computerized devices that connect with various commerce computerized data servers, often web servers, over the internet. Such internet facilitated commerce services are generally referred to as ecommerce.
Although many large corporations, such as Amazon.com, eBay, and the like have transformed commerce through the use of large scale banks of servers, which offer a large range of online products, certain areas of commerce have not advanced as quickly. In particular, smaller scale local merchants such as florists, bakers, party supply vendors, and the like, who often may offer local delivery of various perishable products such as flowers and perishable foods, often for gift purposes, have been less well served.
As a result, often these various local merchants must expend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money creating and updating their own individual ecommerce websites. To assist in this process, certain prior art ecommerce software packages, such as the open source OsCommerce® system, and other systems such as Magento®, are available that provide a prefabricated software ecommerce framework for merchants to set up their own online ecommerce systems. However these prior art prefabricated ecommerce framework software systems still require a considerable amount of customization to optimize. Indeed they are often so complex that usually use of skilled programmers is required to produce good results.
An additional problem that various local merchants, in particular gift merchants such as florists, have is that there is often a need for merchants in one geographic area to cooperate with merchants from another geographic area. Such merchants may have loyal local customers that tend to assume that the merchant has an ability to extend its local services further than may actually be the case, and who turn to the local merchant for assistance for things such as delivering gifts to more distant locations.
Thus, for example, in many third party beneficiary contracts such as gifts, a customer/buyer may wish to work with a local florist to arrange for a more distant florist to deliver a gift of flowers to a third party beneficiary type recipient such as a relative, friend, or business associate.
In an effort to meet these consumer expectations, some local merchants such as florists sign up for relatively high overhead services, such as FTD florist, that allow the florists and their customers to access a central website, and contract with florists located closer to the recipient's location to deliver a standardized series of floral arrangements. However such services come at a cost. Because only a limited range of standardized floral arrangements are made available, it is all too often the case that the florists that happen to be located near the delivery area cannot or would prefer not to deliver the advertised floral arrangements. Further, the prior art delivery charge methods tended to hide the true costs of delivery from the customer, and also tended to impose unrealistic delivery cost expectations on the delivery florist. Thus further improvements in the area of ecommerce technology, in particular for local merchants such as florists that provide gift type perishable products that may also have to be delivered, would be desirable.